A Primer

In the waning years of the twentieth century, it was common to hear predictions that water would be the oil of the twenty-first. A report prepared for the center-right Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, forecast that water, not oil, would be the dominant source of conflict in the Middle East by the year 2000. This prognosis rested in part upon the estimate of US intelligence agencies that by that time “there will be at least ten places in the world where war could break out over dwindling shared water, the majority in the Middle East.” [1]

Interventions and Rivalries in Iraqi Kurdistan

Standing in line outside a Falluja polling station on December 15, 2005, a man named Qays spoke the words that the White House had been waiting to hear since the preceding January 30. “We Sunnis made a mistake in the last elections, and the people are suffering for that mistake. Even the armed groups know that.” The mass abstention of Sunni Arabs from the January 30 elections, some heeding the calls of communal leaders for a boycott and others fearing the death threats of insurgents, left them under-represented in the transitional national assembly and, ultimately, marginal to the process of drafting the new Iraqi constitution that passed a national referendum on October 15. “Bringing the Sunnis back in” was the foremost goal of US diplomacy in Iraq in 2005.

Last week's panic within the Clinton Administration over a potential winter spike in heating oil prices has greatly eased, as oil prices have begun to fall. The Democrats' political planners feared that Republican candidate George W. Bush and voters would blame Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for failing to forestall the price rise that dominated the news for the last two weeks.

Behind US Calls for War Crimes Tribunals for Iraq

In a public break with the US, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook today submitted a draft parliamentary bill supporting the rapid establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) in which to try major war criminals and violators of human rights. The British move to secure the ICC's ratification in Parliament contrasts sharply with the Clinton administration's recalcitrance on the ICC. The US continues to insist on protecting its own nationals from prosecution by the ICC--even at the cost of watering down the court's mandate.